Bio

Born and raised in New York, Washington D.C., and London, I earned my BA in history (cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Yale University in 2011. I received an MSt in US History (with distinction) in 2013 and my DPhil in History in 2017 from the University of Oxford. Before joining the Stanford faculty, I was a Past and Present postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London.

Academic Appointments

  • Associate Professor, History

Program Affiliations

  • American Studies
  • Program in History & Philosophy of Science

Contact

  • Academic
    koli@stanford.edu
    University - Faculty Department: History Department Position: Assoc Professor

Additional Info

  • Mail Code: 2024

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

I am an historian of nineteenth-century America, interested primarily in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, and disease. My research seeks to understand how epidemic yellow fever disrupted Deep Southern society. Nearly every summer, this mosquito-borne virus killed up to ten percent of the urban population. But it also generated culture and social norms in its fatal wake. Beyond the rigid structures of race and unfreedom in Deep Southern society, I argue there was alternate, if invisible, hierarchy at work, with “acclimated” (immune) people at the top and a great mass of “unacclimated” (non-immune) people awaiting their brush with yellow fever languishing in social and professional purgatory. About half of all people died in the acclimating process.

In New Orleans, alleged-imperviousness or vulnerability to epidemic disease evolved into an explanatory tool for success or failure in commodity capitalism, and a justification for a race- and ethnicity-based social hierarchy where certain people were decidedly less equal than others. Disease justified highly asymmetrical social and labor relations, produced politicians apathetic about the welfare of their poor or recently-immigrated constituents, and accentuated the population’s xenophobic, racist, pro-slavery, and individualist proclivities. Alongside skin color, acclimation-status, I argue, played a major role in determining a person’s position, success, and sense of belonging in antebellum New Orleans.

Most of all, disease provided the tacit justification for who did what work during cotton and sugar production, becoming the essence of an increasingly elaborate and tortuous justification for widespread and permanent black slavery. In the Deep Southern view, only enslaved black people could survive work like cane cutting, swamp clearing, and cotton picking. In fact, proslavery theorists argued, black slavery was positively natural, even humanitarian, for it protected the health of whites—and thus the nation writ large—insulating them from diseased-labor and spaces that would kill them.

By fusing health with capitalism in my forthcoming book Necropolis, I will present a new model—beyond the toxic fusion of white supremacy with the flows of global capitalism—for how power operated in Atlantic society.

I am also interested in historical notions of consent (sexual or otherwise); slave revolts in the United States and the Caribbean; anti- and pro-slavery thought; class and ethnicity in antebellum America; the history of life insurance and environmental risk; comparative slave systems; technology and slavery; the Haitian Revolution; and boosterism in the American West.

2024-25 Courses

Stanford Advisees

All Publications

  • Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom Olivarius, K. Harvard University Press. 2022
  • Immunity, Capital, and Power in Antebellum New Orleans American Historical Review Olivarius, K. 2019; 124 (2): 425-455

    View details for DOI 10.1093/ahr/rhz176

  • The influence of vector-borne disease on human history: socio-ecological mechanisms. Ecology letters Athni, T. S., Shocket, M. S., Couper, L. I., Nova, N., Caldwell, I. R., Caldwell, J. M., Childress, J. N., Childs, M. L., De Leo, G. A., Kirk, D. G., MacDonald, A. J., Olivarius, K., Pickel, D. G., Roberts, S. O., Winokur, O. C., Young, H. S., Cheng, J., Grant, E. A., Kurzner, P. M., Kyaw, S., Lin, B. J., Lopez, R. C., Massihpour, D. S., Olsen, E. C., Roache, M., Ruiz, A., Schultz, E. A., Shafat, M., Spencer, R. L., Bharti, N., Mordecai, E. A. 2021

    Abstract

    Vector-borne diseases (VBDs) are embedded within complex socio-ecological systems. While research has traditionally focused on the direct effects of VBDs on human morbidity and mortality, it is increasingly clear that their impacts are much more pervasive. VBDs are dynamically linked to feedbacks between environmental conditions, vector ecology, disease burden, and societal responses that drive transmission. As a result, VBDs have had profound influence on human history. Mechanisms include: (1) killing or debilitating large numbers of people, with demographic and population-level impacts; (2) differentially affecting populations based on prior history of disease exposure, immunity, and resistance; (3) being weaponised to promote or justify hierarchies of power, colonialism, racism, classism and sexism; (4) catalysing changes in ideas, institutions, infrastructure, technologies and social practices in efforts to control disease outbreaks; and (5) changing human relationships with the land and environment. We use historical and archaeological evidence interpreted through an ecological lens to illustrate how VBDs have shaped society and culture, focusing on case studies from four pertinent VBDs: plague, malaria, yellow fever and trypanosomiasis. By comparing across diseases, time periods and geographies, we highlight the enormous scope and variety of mechanisms by which VBDs have influenced human history.

    View details for DOI 10.1111/ele.13675

    View details for PubMedID 33501751

  • Fugitivism: Escaping Slavery in the Lower Mississippi Valley, 1820-1860 (Book Review) ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY Book Review Authored by: Olivarius, K. 2020; 25 (2): 393–95

    View details for DOI 10.1093/envhis/emz090

    View details for Web of Science ID 000536475600013

  • History from the Bottom Up and the Inside Out: Ethnicity, Race, and Identity in Working-Class History. (Book Review) CANADIAN JOURNAL OF HISTORY-ANNALES CANADIENNES D HISTOIRE Book Review Authored by: Olivarius, K. 2019; 54 (1-2): 273–74

    View details for DOI 10.3138/cjh.54.1-2.11-br50

    View details for Web of Science ID 000486224800060

  • Making a Slave State: Political Development in Early South Carolina. (Book Review) JOURNAL OF SOUTHERN HISTORY Book Review Authored by: Olivarius, K. 2019; 85 (2): 416–18

    View details for Web of Science ID 000466836200012